Fargo Tbakhi

in the walgreens parking lot on 44th & Indian school, another massacre

sidles its way onto my screen. a bomb has struck a Gazan school, a tangle of limbs untangled. a cookout of cousins, their breathstaken for granted, then un-granted, taken. at the walgreens on the corner of 44th & Indian school(a street named for the phoenix Indian school, where indigenous children were forcibly taken, strippedof their culture, their gutted histories baked into this asphalt on which my car rests, on which my feetspring, and my feet carry with them a history steeped in theft, in forcibly taken, in prisons, displacement) i taste blood familiar as sea-stink on the breeze. omay i note the streets i walk on, may i sing their massacres, may i bring my own to meet them. and, now, another of my own has leapt onto my phone screen on this street, at this walgreens, where i have stopped to purchase beard oil. the redbox outside offers asylum to a movie where a white man shoots a gun, a woman pilots a drone, two tonguestangle together. o i deem our imaginations complicit. the sun is warming my skin: were i a patch of grass, i might be browned beyond repair. were i a troop of fog, i’d drift and smother the lenses of every cell phone. oi am too human for all my metaphors, bridges i am too much body & too much america to cross. instead, i lean against the friendly wall. light my cigarette, suck down smoke to fog my only lungs. i roll the windows up & dribble beard oil into my palm, crane my neck godwards to see inside my mirror, & rub. greet my cheeks with the tips of my fingers, gentle as a father wiping soot from a baby’s neck. o my lungs tiptoe towards collapse, o i deem my imagination complicit: may my poems nibble at the mortar in our walls. i deem my language colonized:may i find a way to sing death hard & strong. i massage my chin into submission. o skin of my father’s mother, o dear colonized mystery, o hands of prayer, of eating ricepudding, of holding other hands,of holding my phone & clutchingtight, fast, insisting on my anti-forgetting,o thirsty, yearning, thirsty skin, o my people, my people, my people, my people, my people,my people, my people, my people, my people,my people, my people, my people, my people,my people, my people, my people, my people, my people, my people, my people, my people,my people, my people, my people, my people,my people, my people, my people, my people,my people, my people, my people, my people, o may i never find a quiet moment. may everything echo with each of your names, may i find you in every hair, in every parking lot, on every corner of land someone pretends to own,in the boundless confines of every smoky breath.

Fargo Tbakhi (he/him) is a queer Palestinian-american performance artist from Phoenix, Arizona. He is the winner of the 2018 Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship, a Pushcart nominee, and a 2020 Desert Nights, Rising Stars fellow. His work is published in the Shallow Ends, Gay Magazine, Foglifter, Mizna, Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: a Journal of Poetry, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. He tweets @YouKnowFargo and probably wants to hold your hand.